The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [290]
As the world moved into the twentieth century administrators everywhere gained power. Modern governments needed more control over people. Governments had to control who obtained drivers licenses, medical licenses, mail carriers needed to know where to deliver the mail, cars needed registration for tax purposes and to help prevent theft, censuses were required to find out how many people lived in the nation, the military wanted civilians registered so the government could know who to draft in case of war, and on and on. By 1914, governments intruded on the lives of individuals as never before, accomplishing the imposition with bureaucracies tracking and ordering numerous aspects of life for their political masters.
By the 1940s, these bureaucracies had developed to the point that dictators such as Hitler and Stalin could use them to control the population. The modern state with modern technology turned the bureaucracy deadly. The administrators of the Third Reich and the USSR were unthinking, machine like people willing to grind citizens into rubble for the sake of the state, if so ordered by their murdering masters. Without this newer and more thorough bureaucracy, the dictators would have had a much harder time ruling, but with modern bureaucracy the modern state could control individuals very closely. We must remember that governments are things in and of themselves. Government will act in its own self interest as it is not a benign entity. As such, a government will use whatever powers can be acquired to control or suppress people that can harm it or dilute its power. Every government, democratic or autocratic, will do this just because it is the government. Modern machines will increase the power of the government dramatically and thus reduce the power of the individual dramatically.
The ability to categorize and track citizens has increased markedly with the expanding capability of the computer. This ever-multiplying capability to track every aspect of people’s lives amplifies the power of these unseen and unknown administrators who eagerly carry out any command, no matter how evil, of their political rulers. Bureaucracies now hold tremendous power because of technology and its ability to identify and investigate individuals in the populace. As powerful computers begin to correlate the substantial number of individual records such as birth, medical, employment, military, tax, and many more such items, they will also electronically combine this data, thereby multiplying the authority of bureaucrats—and the government. Computers combined with satellites make tracking vehicles and people much easier, and this too will add to the capability of the bureaucracy to control individual lives. Dictators and quasi-authoritarians could make full use of this kind of capability, and the bureaucracy will fully cooperate because it is their job to obey the orders of the government.
This is a growing trend in the modern world. Without some supervision, the administrators can become dictators themselves. More administrative regulations are adopted in the United States than there are laws coming out of Congress. These regulations have large impacts on everyday people, their employment, and many facets of their daily life, but few recognize the administrative intrusion. In 2010, President Obama appointed over 100 Czars to oversee various aspects of his administration. To date, no one has reported the responsibilities of the Czars, what powers were conferred, and it is unknown to whom they report. The growth of a bureaucracy beyond legislative control is dangerous. Watching